The title of today's post is a clever allusion (I hope) to the fact that our travelogue continues, as well as the fact that the hall kidiots were (are?) at it last night with a vengeance: it's 6:24 AM GMT as I write, and the partying noises have only just abated. I've been staring at the ceiling for the last couple of hours, trying to sleep through it. Good thing they're several floors below me, or it would really disturb me. I had set my alarm to go off at 7:00 today anyway, so I might as well get up. I resigned myself to the knowledge that I'm not going to get any more sleep tonight -- I mean, this morning -- anyway.
What's happening to me? Maybe it's age, but I have (literally) slept through earthquakes (more than once), rock concerts (ditto) and bad in-flight turbulence. So why can't I sleep now? If this is a symptom of aging, I don't want it. I take solace in the fact that it is already January 12 (!!!), and the current school term will be over before we know it. Now, on with the show. (A reminder to the computer-challenged among you: click on the photos to enlarge them.)
Forgot to mention yesterday that we took the train from London's Waterloo station to Paris via the Chunnel, which was an oddly minuscule portion of the total travel time clocking in at a mere 20 minutes. We walked around a lot -- in fact, most of our journey seemed to be on foot, consistent with our belief that the best way to take in your surroundings is at street level -- but found the Metro easy to navigate. Of course my fluent French didn't fail me so this made it considerably easier to figure out the configuration of the city into arrondissements. After staying overnight in the Montparnasse district we spent another full day in Paris, including a visit to (but alas -- due to time constraints -- not in) the Louvre, before taking an overnight train to Madrid. One or two of the shots here are taken outside the Louvre.
Apparently I only dreamed that had I previously blogged the news that I upheld the ancient Clean-Air System family Xmas tradition by getting the flu over the holidays. So to make you feel better about seeing all our wonderful, carefree, sunny holiday snaps I will tell you that I was feeling terribly ill with a nasty sore throat and chest cold for most of the time. Sadly this has affected my memories of the first half of the holiday somewhat, but at I have my journal, and of course these photos. I have a recollection of not sleeping on the train, partly because of my illness and partly because my elderly cabin mate Luis kept forgetting to bring the key every time he went to relieve himself after spending the night drinking in the bar car. (Owing to an SNCF snafu for which I wound up paying extra, and partly due to the shortage of seats over the busy holiday travel season, D. and I traveled separately on that train.)
Madrid was suitably magnificent. If I didn't manage to master Spanish while I was there, at least I managed to do a pretty decent job of it. Thank goodness for my background in French. Portuguese turned out to be far trickier -- I mean, it looks like Spanish, but sounds more eastern European -- but that's another story. Most of the pictures in this post are taken at or near the Royal Palace, an impressive 2800-room shack.
Anyway, I'm blithering on again. I said I'd just shut up and let the pictures do the talking. I'm just going to upload the pictures and hope you don't want/need any explanation; to be honest I can't actually remember where we were for many of the shots anyway, at least not without referring back to my notes, which I'm frankly too lazy, I mean busy, to do. (Did I mention my thesis proposal is due Monday?) By the way, credit D. with the photos... except of course the ones she's in, which were probably mine. (How do you know I took it? It looks like there's something growing out of her head, other than her dreadlocks I mean.) Oops, Blogger's getting cranky again. Maybe I've uploaded too many images or something, I dunno. I'd better sign off for now then. More photos later, like it or not.
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